Krugman Apologizes for His Florida 2000 Apology
As you may recall, Paul Krugman wrote an “Al Gore won Florida in 2000″ column that was not only so logically strained as to bring his competence into question, but also turned out to be flat-out factually incorrect in several aspects. Krugman had to issue an apology for the grievous errors.
Now it turns out that he was even more inaccurate than he initially admitted.
But, in the spirit of “fake but accurate,” he still manages to pull deception out of the jaws of journalistic honesty:
None of this has any bearing on my original point … that, when you combine that fact with the effects of vote suppression and ballot design, it becomes reasonably clear that the voters of Florida, as well as those of the United States as a whole, tried to choose Mr. Gore.
This is, of course, utter nonsense.
First, I will again point out that tens of thousands of illegal Florida votes for Gore were cast by “Snowbird voters” from New York. That indisputable voter fraud swamps, by orders of magnitude, and and all questionable votes that might, even under the most lopsided criteria, have gone for Gore.
Second, the rule is not “make every vote count,” but rather make every valid vote count.” Stated differently, there is no right to be an idiot in the voting booth. If you’re too stupid to figure out how to vote, then too bad so sad. Perhaps you shouldn’t be voting in the first place.
In any case, Krugman forgot one of life’s most basic rules: When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
Similar Posts:
- Florida Recount: 2000 + 4 = 2000
- Krugman Beats a Dead Election Horse
- That’s “TimesSelect” — Not “TimesCorrect”
- War on Terror: Krugman v. Brooks
- Arizona’s Voter ID Law May Go Too Far
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I won't go into the Florida thing. Like with the OJ issue a few years back, I was curious about people's interest but found that following the details was – how to put it diplomatically? Like watching a moron tell an idiot how to watch the grass grow, on CourtTV.
But, "there is no right to be an idiot in the voting booth" – interesting. There's no duty to be literate in order to exercise the franchise; there's no duty to have graduated high school. There is no _right_ by the government or anyone else to put impediments in the way of citizens who have achieved their majority attempting to vote – you know, things like purging the voter rolls of "felons," sending out (false) notices that persons attempting to vote will be checked against outstanding-warrant lists or forced to pay all parking tickets or unpaid child support. All false, all "good ideas" in the sense of being helpful for some other policy goal… all apparently calculated to suppress the black vote in Florida, for example.
There's no right to criticize people who screwed up the butterfly ballot. I challenge you to open up an actual-size copy of one of those, with its lack of color-coding, its outstandingly poor design, and its confusing circles and get it right the first time. The democrats who chose it and the republicans who went along with it should all be horsewhipped. Morons.
I agree that we can't force people to, say, vote while informed, or vote while not drunk, or vote intelligently. But can't we insist that the persons they try to vote for and the persons they succeed in tallying votes for are as close as is reasonably possible? Wouldn't that, you know, minimize outrageous error like Palm Beach retirees coming out in force for Buchanan?